1. Technical Field
Various embodiments relate to a semiconductor device, and more particularly, to a semiconductor device and a computer system including the same.
2. Related Art
A computer system performs a booting operation in order to initialize when supplied power. The booting operation can be divided into a cold booting operation and a warm booting operation depending on whether power to the computing system was previously cut-off. The cold booting may refer to a booting operation where the computer system is powered up and restarts itself after power to the computer system has been completely cut-off. Warm booting may refer to a booting operation where the computer system restarts itself when power to the computer system has not been previously cut-off.
The cold booting operation has different booting sequences from those of the warm booting operation. During the cold booting operation, a processor accesses a read-only memory (ROM), moves a basic input/output system (BIOS) information from the ROM to non-ROM memory and reads the BIOS information stored in the non-ROM memory for restarting the computer system. During the warm booting operation, the processor reads the BIOS information stored in non-ROM memory for restarting the computer system without access to the ROM. Because in a warm booting operation the computer system restarts when power has not been lost, the BIOS information remains in non-ROM memory. Non-ROM memory has faster access speed than that of the ROM and therefore makes the booting operation faster.
Further, during the warm booting operation the processor reads and compares an ID value stored in non-ROM memory and ROM. The ID value may be part of the BIOS information for performing the booting operation. When the ID value stored in the non-ROM memory and ROM are equal, the processor reads data stored in non-ROM memory for performing the booting operation. When the ID value stored in non-ROM memory and the ROM are not equal, the processor reads the BIOS information stored in the ROM for performing the booting operation.
There may be unintended errors during the booting operation as a computer system is developed and versions of the BIOS information keeps changing. For example, there may be an error in which the processor performs the warm booting operation with the BIOS stored in non-ROM memory when the computer system should be reading BIOS from ROM as part of a cold booting operation.